Comesaña, M. 1 , Soares, A. P. 1 , Sánchez-Casas, R. 2 , Rauber, A. 3 , Villalva, A. 4 , Pinheiro, A. P. 1 & Fraga, I. 5
1 University of Minho (Portugal)
2 University of Rovira I Virgili (Spain)
3 Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil)
4 University of Lisbon (Portugal)
5 University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
In bilingualism research, many authors have strived to explain the processing advantage of cognate words over non-cognate words using different tasks targeting both accuracy and response time. Although in the last decade different studies have been carried out to address this issue (Costa, Santesteban, & Caño, 2005; Dijkstra, Miwa, Brummelhuis, Sapelli, & Baayer, 2010; Davis, Sánchez-Casas, García-Albea, Ferré, Guasch, & Molero, 2010), the question still remains open. In this study we aimed at testing two of the major theoretical proposals advanced to explain the origin of the cognate’s effect by combining electrophysiological correlates and behavioral data. Whereas the lexical-morphological hypothesis (Sánchez-Casas & García-Albea, 2005) suggests a different level of representation for cognate words in the bilingual memory, the phonological-sublexical hypothesis (Hoshino & Kroll, 2008) denies the existence of a different lexical status, rather emphasizing the phonological similarity as the cause of the observed processing advantage for these words. In order to contrast these hypotheses, we selected 216 stimuli: 108 cognate words (54 high vs. 54 low phonological similarity, controlling for orthographic overlap and morphological encoding) and 108 non-cognate words. Twenty European Portuguese (L1)-English (L2) proficient bilinguals performed a silent reading task in the L2 combined with a masked priming paradigm under conditions of brief SOA (50 ms). This paradigm allowed a better understanding of the processing of cognate words, and of its temporal course, as a function of their phonological overlap. The results are discussed in the light of the aforementioned hypotheses.